Capote

After reading this essay and hearing all the buzz about the movie, it looks I'll have to add re-reading In Cold Blood to my 2006 to-do list. I remember reading it in high school, but was probably too young to appreciate the groundbreaking nature of the work.

Capote was hardly the first writer to recognize that non-fiction need not be deadly earnest or helium-balloon breezy. Many of his predecessors, including Joseph Mitchell and Lillian Ross, engaged in this kind of reporting, but Capote's attempt to graft the techniques of imaginative literature onto a non-fiction story was more brazen, more unremitting, and on a larger scale. He came out of the gate firing away, claiming to have invented a new form: the non-fiction novel. Everything about it was innovative: his use of cinematic devices, the way he enters a scene as late as possible and gets out of it as early as possible, the cross-cutting, and especially the agonizing slow motion when he finally gets around to describing the crime itself. He was so successful in raising the bar that today we take his innovations for granted, losing sight of the revolutionary nature of immersing readers in the way people really talk, in a headlong rush, full of loops and asides, without a bunch of stilted "according to's" or other cumbersome, momentum-breaking devices.

The true theme of this book is seduction.

[...]

Capote earned $2 million in the first year "In Cold Blood" came out and became an international celebrity. If the killers' take from the murders could not have been more pathetic, the personal cost of telling the story could not have been higher for Capote. He invested his psyche in the project, and by the end he could no longer live with himself, or at least not with the song-and-dance routine that used the deaths of four real people to line his coffers and lubricate his social status. He said that he felt writing the book, or, more precisely, living with the details of that story so intimately for so long, catapulted him into ill health and led to the insomnia and substance abuse that dogged him during his final years. The author clearly tossed and turned as he grappled with the question: What is the price of art?

Capote